SCO Amends Novell Complaint

rm69990 writes "According to Groklaw, SCO now seeks to amend their complaint against Novell. SCO says it 'seeks leave to file a Second Amended Complaint in significant part in consideration of the counterclaims that Novell asserted in its Answer and Counterclaims.' SCO now accuses Novell of infringing SCO's copyrights by distributing SUSE Linux, of breaching a non-compete clause between the two companies, and SCO is also asking for specific performance forcing Novell to turn over the Unix copyrights to SCO. So SCO is essentially admitting that Novell owns the copyrights at this point, but is saying that Novell breached the contract (that specifically excluded copyrights) by failing to transfer them to Santa Cruz."

Comments

Re:Wha?!?

['nother poster]

Here is the short version. Novell contracted with SCO to manage the UNIX licensing, but did not transfer the ownership of the Copyrights. This is disputed by SCO. Part of that agreement, according to SCO, was that Novell would continue to sell it's existing line of OS products. This is not competing since they are handled by the license agreement and SCO would get a pittance for each copy sold by Novell. SCO says that Linux violates this because they don't get any money from Novell selling Linux because it's not part of the license agreement, therefore competing.

They also claim that parts of UNIX were misappropriated into Linux, therefore they should get ownership of those parts also, but that is a seperate part of the complaint

Re:How can they keep doing this?

[confusion]

The answer is that they're not doing well financially at all. They continue to get infusions of cash from private investors to cover ongoing legal costs: http://www.forbes.com/2005/12/22/jetblue-applied-s ignal-cx_dn_1222eyeonstocks.html

I suspect they can keep it up for another year or so before they start running out of investors to screw.

Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/

Re:/. editors up to their usual form

[mkoenecke]

Just to clarify a bit, as an attorney: it's termed "pleading in the alternative," and in this case SCO's claim is better described as "We maintain that we own the copyrights; but even *if* that were not the case, we would win anyway because Defendant was contractually obligated to transfer them to us." It is not the same thing as admitting, even conditionally, that they might not own the copyrights.

(Note: just pointing out how "pleading further and in the alternative" works, not - Heaven forbid - supporting those clowns at SCO.)